Access to telephony service is important for rural and isolated communities. However, while urban areas typically offer a variety of telephony services, such as landline, wireless, and broadband, rural areas often have limited or no telephony services. For example, many Asian countries have a penetration of four (4) telephone lines per one-hundred (100) inhabitants in urban areas, but a penetration of less than 0.2 per one-hundred (100) in rural areas. Access to telephony service is non-existent in some African countries and in some parts of Latin America.
Current telephone systems are expensive to deploy. For example, a typical cellular system requires a mobile switching center (MSC), a base station controller (BSC), and a home location register/visitor location register (HLR/VLR), collectively costing over two million dollars. Moreover, such a system requires a minimum of ten thousand users in order to be economically viable. Many rural areas lack a population large enough to support the installation of such a system. In addition, the environmental conditions in which the equipment, e.g., the MSC, BSC, and HLR/VLR, operates may be extremely harsh or cost-prohibitive to deploy. Alternatives, such as landline systems, are also expensive to deploy and face even more environmental restrictions.